Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and Writing of the British National Identity

For a long time, Lyrical Ballads has been regarded as the manifesto of British Romanticism. However, if we put it back into the nineteenth century history, we will find its significance as a social and political text. The late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth witnessed the rise of nationalism and formation of new nations across Europe. Influenced by this newly-rising national sentiment, Wordsworth, in collaboration with Coleridge, created Lyrical Ballads, expressed his imagination of the national identity by shaping the vernacular poet into a national poet, replacing the neoclassical language with everyday speech, and setting the British canon against the European canon.